There is ongoing growth in the landscaping industry at large. The use of pre-grown sod as a substitute of seed planting for lawn grasses has become far more common and widely accepted. The same can be said for nursery grown trees, bushes, flowering shrubs and the like. It is not uncommon for a newly constructed home or other building to then be landscaped to the extent that it appears as if the landscaping is matured at the time it is planted.
The same can be done for hedgerows. In a commercial nursery environment the process begins with rooted cuttings, or seed germination with the seeds planted in individual seed cups or trays and kept in a warm environment, with access to direct sunlight, suitable for seed germination, often in a green house. The seedlings, or rooted cuttings, as they grow, are then repotted into larger pots and allowed to grow to suitable size. When the still immature plants are of suitable size and hardiness, they are then planted in rows in the ground where they can be adequately cultivated and watered so that they can grow into a hedgerow suitable for transplantation to a final landscaping site.
However, the prior art for replanting a hedgerow has traditionally been accomplished by hand. A small portion of a hedgerow, pre-grown at a nursery, will be cut using a hand shovel into smaller portions of one or two plants and the root balls for the small sections are dug up using a shovel and individually wrapped in a ball using a loosely weaved cloth to hold the soil to the roots to prevent the roots from drying out. These numerous balls can then be transported to landscaping sites where they are replanted one at a time back in a row to form the hedge. It is difficult to handle by hand larger portions of the hedge and their attendant root balls and up until now, nothing has been done to automate this process. Furthermore, if the hedges were planted next to each other in the nursery, when replanting at the final landscaping site, it is difficult to position them together again. When individually harvested and replanted, the portions which grew together are difficult, if not impossible to mate up in the same way they were situated in the nursery setting.
This, of course, is time consuming and expensive way to transplant hedges. When the property owner desires to incorporate a hedge as a landscaping feature, it is typically planted by hand with relatively small plants which are spaced apart and with the hopes that they will eventually grow together to form a fully formed hedgerow. Hedgerows can be made of a variety of different plants including trees, shrubs, and perennial bunch grasses which have erect stems attaining average heights of at least a couple of feet and persist well over the winter. Some of the trees include Maple, Arborvitae, Yew, White Spruce, Hawthorne, Hemlock; the shrubs include Buckwheat, Coffeeberry, Coyote Bush and Quail Bush.
It is the object of the present invention to automate transplantation, foliage separation, and root-pruning of a nursery grown hedgerow using equipment capable of cutting and separating preselected lengths of a preexisting hedgerow, grown in a nursery, and depositing them into tray like containers, which preferably should be biodegradable, which can then be loaded onto a truck or trailer and transported to the landscaping job site where they are off-loaded and planted.